Mayor of Annapolis Gavin Buckley comments on the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, on Thursday.
Photograph: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images

Gavin Buckley, the mayor of Annapolis, was distraught in the wake of the mass shooting at his city’s local newspaper, telling the Guardian: “What’s wrong with our society that we’re this tightly wound that you can be this upset at a newspaper that reports stories on cats being stuck up a tree?”

Although Buckley made clear that the Annapolis Capital-Gazette, the newspaper where five people were shot dead on Thursday, was a good paper; he was just still in shock that it was a target. After all, when he was told that there had been a shooting at the Capital, his initial response was to think of Maryland’s state capital in the heart of downtown Annapolis.

Annapolis shooting: at least five dead in attack on newspaper office

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To him, the Capital Gazette “reports on our kids’ soccer games and good, local, interesting stuff that we want to hear about” and he could not understand how “that could make someone that hostile”.

He said earlier: “This paper is not a liberal newspaper, it’s not a right wing newspaper, it stays in the middle and covers local issues,” he said.

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What we know about the Capital Gazette shooting – video report

Buckley also expressed his concern that it was a targeted attack on the media. “If this is an attack on journalism it is a sad state of affairs,” said the first-term mayor. “Because journalists, you don’t get paid enough to put your life on the line, we’re not in some war zone, we’re not in some third-world country with a dictator. We are in a Mayberry kind of town, we’re in shock we’re going to be grappling with.”

Among those connecting the events in Annapolis to Donald Trump’s attacks on the media was David Simon, the creator of The Wire. “Blood today in an American newsroom. Aren’t you proud, you vile, fascist son of a bitch?” Simon wrote on Twitter in response to a February tweet from the president that referred to “the fake news media” as “the enemy of the American people”.

Simon used to be a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, whose parent company owns the Gazette. He later tweeted to say he had been friends with two journalists who died in the shooting.

Annapolis, Maryland’s state capital, is one of the oldest cities in the country and noted for its historic downtown and scenic wharfs. Buckley, an Australian American restaurateur, noted “We’re such an accepting community they’ll even let an Australian be their mayor here.”

He went out of his way though to praise the police response, with officers said to have arrived in less than a minute. “I can tell you they saved lives by being there as fast as they were,” he told the Guardian. “They put their own lives in danger to do this and people need to know that that’s what emergency responders do. They are selfless.” Buckley added: “These guys, they weren’t thinking about if the guy had a grenade, a semi-automatic weapon or a rifle. They just knew they had to get him.”

A Democrat who recently spoke at the March for our Lives, Buckley warned: “We can’t numb ourselves to this stuff. We have to say enough is enough.”

More broadly, Capital Gazette journalists expressed disgust at the lack of action coming from Washington over the latest gun outrage.

The staff writer Selene San Felice responded to news that Donald Trump had extended “thoughts and prayers” to the victims. She told CNN: “I’m not trying to make this political, but we need more than prayers. I want your prayers, but I want something else.”

Felice added: “This is going to be a story for how many days? Less than a week? People will forget about us in less than a week. I’m going to need more than a couple of days of news coverage and thoughts and prayers – our whole lives have been shattered.”

The Baltimore Sun released an editorial pointing to the atmosphere of hostility toward journalism at present in the US. “At a time of political divisiveness when views of the news industry itself have become starkly polarised, many jumped quickly to speculation about whether the metaphorical war on the media had become shockingly literal ... That’s why so many reporters across the nation got a sickening feeling Thursday afternoon – they couldn’t believe something like this had happened, except that they could.”

During a police press conference, Pat Furgurson, a veteran journalist for the Capital Gazette, stood behind the police in an untucked blue shirt and rumpled khakis, recording audio and even getting in a question.

Afterwards, Furgurson briefly talked to his fellow reporters. Visibly shaken, he said the victims were “just trying to do their job for the public. Something like this might happen in Afghanistan or Iraq or something like that but you don’t expect it in a sleepy office across the street from a local mall.” However he insisted “we’re still putting out a newspaper” and that the Capital Gazette would be out on Friday.

Asked if he had any message for others, Furguson choked up and paused for a minute. He then said “what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding” and walked away. After all, he had a story to file.